


Go Fetch the String and the Wire

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s02e21 All Hell Breaks Loose, Episode: s02e22 All Hell Breaks Loose, Incest, M/M, Protective Sam Winchester, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-12
Updated: 2013-06-12
Packaged: 2017-12-14 19:20:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/840455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam swears he'll spend the next year saving Dean; this is what he does.  Written after "All Hell Breaks Loose, Parts 1-2."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Go Fetch the String and the Wire

The sky is a bruise, hollowed out clouds hanging low over the tree line in the distance and the asphalt steaming from an early morning rain. Sam drives slowly; he’s in no hurry today. Dean is sleeping next to him, Sam’s old hoodie wadded up against the glass for a pillow. Wyoming grows smaller in the rearview. 

Every five miles or so, Sam checks his brother’s profile. Dean’s cheekbone is purpling over, his face halved by a crooked line of blood that will likely scar. Sam settles his hand gently on Dean’s thigh, just above his knee, a touch so slight that his fingers warm only gradually. Eventually Dean stirs, reaches out in his sleep, his fingers finally coming to rest in the spaces between Sam’s.

Sam knows he’s a selfish bastard, but there is a part of him he can’t make sorry he’s not dead. He’s alive and Dean’s soul is stuck fast in his chest for another 364 days, and they’ve got time.

@@@

Sam finds Jake’s blood dried in the hair behind his left ear. He shampoos twice. He can’t muster the energy to be sorry about Jake either; he learned vengeance early and well. Standing under the scalding spray, Sam closes his eyes and remembers the look on Dean’s face back in the graveyard, the shift of his brother’s eyes that told him what secret thing Dean had done. No, Sam’s not sorry about Jake. 

He hands over the shower to Dean and wanders into the kitchen. Ellen is hunched at the table and crying into Bobby’s cell. “Damn it, Jo. Pick up the phone. Something big’s gone down. Ash is . . . Just call me. I need to know you’re okay.” Sam doesn’t know what to say to her, and she doesn’t give him the chance anyway. She places Bobby’s phone carefully in the center of the table and walks stiffly out the back door. Through the screen, Sam watches her lean against the rusted out shell of a Ford Tempo and press the heel of her hand to her mouth. When she cries, Sam looks away so that she is only a vague shape in his peripheral vision.

Bobby rattles up the drive in the beat up Jeep he uses for grocery runs and Sam helps him carry in the bags. Sam unpacks cans of Manwich and Campbells and a suitcase of High Life and Bobby puts them away. He’s hunkered down over the bottom cabinet, stacking tuna, when he just stops, his hand white knuckled on the countertop. “We’re not letting Dean die. You hear me, Sam?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Goddamn Winchesters. That boy’s just as much a dumbass as John ever was.” Bobby stands, claps Sam on the shoulder then and his voice breaks when he speaks next. “But it’s good to have you back, Sam. Real good.”

Later that night, Sam takes Dean by the hand and they walk carefully and quietly into the damp night. Dean eases the Impala to the far edge of the junkyard and follows Sam into the backseat.

“Sam. Please,” Dean says and Sam knows what he’s asking. Dean wants him to moan his name, to scratch his nails roughly down his back, to dig his fingers in at the hips on every stroke because these things mean that Sam is alive. So Sam gives his brother what he needs. He pins Dean to the seat and sucks down his cock, long wet strokes of his mouth that leave Dean flushed and trembling beneath him. He pulls Dean’s head back by his hair, _hard_ , and bites Dean’s throat at the pulse point. 

“Dean, Dean,” he says when Dean’s fingers are moving in him. “God, Dean. Like that.”

Finally, Sam fucks him and every thrust means, _I’ll save you._ Every gasp Dean wrenches from him, every breath that hitches in Sam’s chest, saying, _I’ll save you. I’ll save you._

@@@

The first one comes to him in a motel two days ride out of Bobby’s when Dean is across the street buying breakfast. It’s just a shape, a rippling blackness, an absolute absence with form—paradox. “We’re waiting,” it says. “We’re waiting for you.”

Sam flattens himself against the wall, the holy water out of reach. He feels something deep in his gut, an elemental pull, the force of gravity working on a heavy object. He knows somehow that this demon is his to do with as he will; the knowledge makes him nauseated. “Leave,” Sam says, and he sweats into his flannel shirt until it does.

It siphons through the slit under the door, and Sam searches out the crack in the salt line, three hairs thick and next to the jamb. He pours all the salt in his duffel across the doorway and along the windowsill and refuses to answer Dean’s, “Dude, what the fuck?” when he comes back.

@@@

Dean is drunk, sloppy and earnest in a way Sam hasn’t seen him since before he left for Stanford. He paws at Sam’s face, holds his jaw cupped in his hands and says, “I had to do it, Sammy. I just couldn’t. . . I had to.”

Sam wants to tell him what he feels like to be the object of that kind of love, how much it awes and scares him to know the lengths his brother is willing to go to for him, but he can’t find the words. “I know,” he breathes against Dean’s neck and lays him tenderly on the bed.

That night, Sam dreams of Ava. Her head doesn’t sit quite right on her shoulders and a thin line of blood trickles from her mouth to stain the collar of her shirt. She sits cross-legged on the air conditioner in their motel room and when she laughs, it’s high and sweet and Sam can’t help smiling himself.

“Sorry about trying to kill you. It was this whole destiny thing. You understand.”

“Yeah.” 

“You know what you have to do.” She looks at Dean, asleep on his stomach and ass in the air like a little boy.

“Will that work?” Sam hasn’t prayed in a long time, not since he watched Madison’s blood pool on the floor around her body, but something like hope returns to him now.

Ava shrugs, her head rolling down over her shoulder grotesquely. “You know I don’t know, Sam. This is just you talking to yourself.”

Sam wakes abruptly. In his sleep, Dean has kicked the covers onto the floor and Sam is cold except for the places where Dean’s legs and arms touch his own.

@@@

Dean doesn’t regret the deal. Sam knows that. But Dean is manic now that his time is growing small. He talks a little too loudly, his voice reverberating off the walls of motels and half-empty diners. He eats too much and starts keeping Tums under his pillow next to his knife. Dean drags Sam to every carnival he can find, to matinees at the cinema, to a water park in Orlando where Sam burns the tops of his feet. When they fuck, Dean is frantic, as if he is already disappearing, as if these moments are the only connection to life that he retains. Sam slows him down, hands gentling along Dean’s sides, until they can move together in peace.

Sam practices for the first time in the parking lot of an Econo Lodge. He calls a demon to him and paints the sky with it—long looping arcs, a stick figure, his name in letters two feet tall—before he sends it away. When it has gone, Sam stands shaking in the halo of a streetlight and grins so widely his cheeks ache after.

Six hundred miles and two states later, Sam is ready.

@@@

They spend the spring with Bobby. One night Sam leaves for takeout and keeps on driving. The crossroads four towns over is deserted at midnight, nothing but farmland for miles in every direction and the stars hard and bright overhead. Sam calls her and she comes.

“Sammy,” she says. “You know, I really expected you much earlier than this. Kinda playing fast and loose with big brother’s soul, aren’t we?”

“I’m not playing anymore,” Sam says. “Dean’s life for yours. That’s my offer.”

She laughs in his face, all teeth. “That’s not the way it works, sugar. And even if it did, you don’t have that kind of power.”

“Wanna bet?” Sam pulls her to him with his mind. She resists, the earth furrowing behind her dragging heels. “You let Dean live and you let him keep his soul and I won’t destroy you.” Sam unthreads the demon from the body it inhabits and ties it in knots, over and over again, before shoving it back inside. She doubles over, gagging, her eyes inhuman and afraid. “Do we have a deal?”

“Yes,” she whispers, and then she kisses him. Her mouth is cold and wet, and she tastes faintly of blood. Sam leaves her on her knees in the upturned earth where the roads converge.

Sam drives back to Bobby’s with the windows rolled down; he flips on the radio and sings along with whatever plays, thumbs beating the bass line against the steering wheel when he doesn’t know the words. The highway winds close to the river most of the way and the good clean smell of water fills the open cab. The Impala’s headlights cut cleanly into the darkness before him and miles up ahead yet, Dean waits. Sam presses his foot to the floor, watching everything outside dissolve in the rearview.

**Author's Note:**

> I completely stole the notion of the sky as a bruise from Umberto Eco's _The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana_ , and the title of the fic comes from Ryan Adams' "The String and the Wire."
> 
> The String and the Wire
> 
> Oh sweet Tennessee rose all split up into parts  
> Go fetch the string and the wire  
> Go fetch the string and the wire from the kitchen drawer  
> And I'll try to mend you up some more 
> 
> Warm, warm wind blow on these here two hands  
> How they froze up fright  
> They got too numb to knot the ends  
> Go fetch the string and the wire  
> Go fetch the string and the wire from the kitchen drawer  
> And I'll try to mend you up some more 
> 
> They put poison in the well  
> Made your sister cry and run  
> So I'm sewing up a blanket spread  
> To keep the jailhouse warm 
> 
> So go fetch the string and the wire  
> Go fetch the string and the wire  
> And a couple empty cans of tin  
> So we can hear her cry again 
> 
> They put powder in the shells of your brother's lonely gun  
> I'm afraid they don't make string and wire I know that's strong enough  
> So go fetch my spinning spool  
> Go fetch my spinning spool underneath the bed  
> And I'll sew you up a handkerchief instead


End file.
